Portrait Fra Carnevale1470Artist Unknown

Presentation of the Virgin at the TempleFra Carnevale, Circa 1467

One image, taken at the Walters, emphasizes dreamlike space with what may be a wry comment on one of the gems in the Walters’s collection. By photographing a sculpture court with studied symmetry, such that its architectural elements feel as tightly controlled as a drafting student’s exercise in perspective, Hofer’s photograph echoes the dreamlike emptiness and authoritarian bleakness of a famous Walters painting, “The Ideal City,” by the 15th-century Italian painter Fra Carnevale.

Luke Syson. "Fra Carnevale." 147 (February 2005), pp. 136–38, agrees with Carloni [see Ref. 2005] that the Barberini Panels were probably executed by Fra Carnevale for a reliquary cupboard in Santa Maria della Bella at about the same time that he painted the altarpiece, which is now lost.

Exciting in its detectivesque scholarship, From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master rediscovers a long neglected artist. Mentioned by Vasari, Giovanni di Bartolomeo Corradini was born in Urbino where he would later return. Moving to Florence in his twenties, Corradini joined the workshop of Filippo Lippi. The Brera-Metropolitan venture investigates early Renaissance rules of apprenticeship, workshop practices, and patronage. It reaffirms the status of Medicean Florence as a visual arts metropolis. Interestingly, it makes the viewer aware of linguistic diffusion and geographic adaptation. The catalogue, however, does not clearly address the interaction of the artists represented and the Guild of St. Luke (Compagnia di San Luca o dei pittori). It does not study in depth the artistic dialogue between painters and Florentine architects.

The Ideal CityFra Carnevaleca. 1480-1485

In Fra Carnevale's The Birth of the Virgin the foreground is sparingly occupied by idealized looking ladies moving to and fro with quiet dignity. The movement of the figures is gentle, but alert. The slow and unified movement of the figures creates a calming, yet realistic and balanced scene for the viewer. One woman leads a child by the hand and two greet each other with a handclasp. The holding and clasping of each other's hands not only suggests visitation, but also can be seen as a representation of responsibility and the embracement of one another.

Fra Carnevale (Umbrian-Florentine, active ca. 1445-1484)

Fra Carnevale: The Birth of the Virgin

No less notable is that the mother of the child—remarkably young for Saint Anne—is shown lying in bed nude. Virtually every fifteenth-century scene of the birth of the Virgin shows Anne reclining in bed, decorously dressed to receive visitors. Fra Carnevale's departure from this convention would be inexplicable were it not that the three maids attending her—unlike the woman sitting by her—are clothed . In other words, the birth has been imagined as a past event refracted through the ceremonies of contemporary life. This was not an uncommon practice: it is also true of Ghiberti's , in which, in the story of Jacob and Esau, only the two youths are shown wearing contemporary clothes. The New York panel nonetheless remains unique for associating the haloed mother with a classical past rather than a fifteenth-century present. In sum, it would seem that the Metropolitan painting does, indeed, show a religious scene involving the birth of a girl, with well-wishers ceremoniously greeting each other in the foreground and men in the portico and background chatting, riding, or bringing home game. It is perhaps an indication of the religious theme that two of the women in the foreground hold prayer beads.

Fra Carnevale - The Annunciation (detail)

The catalogue, extensively illustrated, designed and printed to the Met's usual exemplary standards, is the latest word on an artist, mentioned briefly by Vasari, whose reputation has survived primarily because of his association with major architects from Bramante to Alberti. Catalogue essays address the historiography, situate Fra Carnevale within the circle of Filippo Lippi in Florence, Urbino, and the Marches, and explore his relation to architectural theory, representation, and practice. Appendices include the important new archival evidence that confirmed the panels' attribution as well as Fra Carnevale's architectural work in Urbino, and two essays which investigate the artist's technique. The primary corporate sponsor, Bracco, specializes in medical diagnostic imaging, and its interest was piqued by the contributions of technical analyses to the research for the exhibition. Various light studies, imaging techniques, and paint samplings address the artist's compositional development, perspectival schemes, painting technique, and the carpentry of the polyptychs. Researchers established that Fra Carnevale did not ground his [End Page 1316] flesh tones with verdaccio, as did Lippi, thus reminding us that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian practice is more varied than the limited written sources of Cennini and others suggest. Infrared reflectography reveals that Fra Carnevale drew the figures in the nude then clothed them in the painting stage, which conforms exactly to Alberti's directions in Della pittura (II.36).

Reviews

“ Yet the forty-nine drawings, paintings, reliefs, manuscripts, and one reliquary exhibited in New York added up to more than background for viewing Fra Carnevale's slight extant painted oeuvre. For viewers on this side of the Atlantic, it was a rare opportunity to explore the transmission of ideas across central Italy in the late Quattrocento, as well as an introduction to a little-known group of artists working in Urbino just as Federico de Montefeltro was transforming the town into an exemplary Renaissance court. The exhibition opened with an altarpiece of Lippi's, reassembled from panels in New York and Turin, which demonstrated his transformation of a Gothic tradition into a fully Renaissance language that attracted young artists from across Italy to his workshop. Labels suggested that patronage played a significant role in determining the style of the artworks: a courtly taste in Florence continued to value medieval holdovers, such as gilding, contrasting with markedly antiquarian interests in Urbino, as well as a Franciscan-influenced populism in the Marches. Viewers had to figure out how Giovanni Boccati's bland Virgin surrounded by a decoratively polychrome angelic chorus was more populist than the directly emotive Florentine examples derived from Lippi or Donatello. The curators were at pains to refute the label of provincial for painters such as Boccati or Giovanni Angelo d'Antonio; but should we really attribute their quality to regional taste rather than to limited education or abilities? ”